CO129-593-3 Rehabilitation of Hong Kong University. For extracted photographs see CN 3-45 12-1-1946 - 27-10-1946 — Page 221

2.35

Part B.

Extract from letter dated 22nd January, 1946 from Professor W. J. Hinton to Mr. C. W. M. Cox referring to the lectures quoted above.

There is little that I would wish to change in the lecture, but I am now less confident than I was then that the island of

small peninsula at Kowloon will remain

Hong Kong and the British territory If things go well

when the lease of the new territory expires. for China all the Hongkong area may have to be returned to China within twenty years.

It might be thought that this prospect makes it unwise to re-establish the University, but I submit, on the contrary, that in that case it is all the more important for us to leave behind us, as we shall leave. in India, social institutions embodying some of the essential values of our own variant of European civilisation. And among these, institutions none is more certain to preserve such values than a good university, since universities are often more long-lived than the states in which they are founded.

university and its tradition would link us permanently, and

to mutual advantage, with the Chinese.

Another point is not made strongly enough in this lecture. I submit that we should now concentrate on cultivating a few fields of advanced study since the basic "College of Liberal Arts and Sciences" can easily be rebuilt and strengthened on the

foundations already laid. Among these advanced studies there will be at least one professional school, that in Medicine and, perhaps, one in Civil Engineering; both of these should be post-graduate in character. They too can be rebuilt from the existing foundations. But in addition there should be new organisation for post-graduate studies in science, Letters and Philosophy, selected with due regard to local conditions, facilities elswhere in the Far East, and a number of other considerations. For example, it might be found that studies in bio-chemistry, in marine biology, in English language and literature, with special reference to translation and to speech, might be suitable.

There are other valuable suggestions in the papere you have circulated. Whatever the advanced studies chosen they should be few but exceedingly well done and, of course, they should be related to one another so as to afford mutual support.

The research professors and visiting experts should begin work in 1947 and not wait until the undergraduate work has grown up again. Their library and laboratory facilities should be built up now, for these new post-graduate departments will attract graduate students from China at once if suitable financial arrangements can be made. Within four years there is every reason to hope that one or two of these post-graduate schoole might have as many students as they need and, what is more important, might already have produced some noteworthy.contribution in their special fields.

No harm would be done if this post-graduate side quickly overgrew the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences so that the University of Hongkong came to be predominantly an institution for advanced study and research, drawing its students from Chinese universities and playing an important part in the international organisation of learning in the Far East.

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